George Wright keeps his eye on emerging technology trends and figures out how they impact life and business.

I am a crazy tinkerer when it comes to technology. It drives my family to despair sometimes because my various computing devices are in a near perpetual state of almost working perfectly (or brokenness as they might put it). I have always pulled things apart and nearly always been able to put them back together.

When I first started using computers back in the Apple II and Amiga days, my friends would play games but I would execute every system executable to see what would happen. I was a strange child. I would see if I could chain together pieces of binary in shell scripts to see if I could change the way in which the computer worked. I then discovered Unix in my first year of university. My path was set and I was in love. For the record, I’m a VI in the eternal VI versus EMACS war.

I learnt early on that computers were hard to break but easy to upset.

This spirit of prodding and poking which evidenced itself strongly during the 60s among computer software, electronics and model train enthusiasts became known as “hacking”. Hackers desired to know as much as they could about the systems they used at work or at play and also to share that knowledge and show off their successes and failures. Hacking is as much about the recombining of pieces as it is about the disassembling - a form of electronic and digital alchemy.

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The hacking culture was essential for the creation of the giants of technology that we have today. Steve Wozniak’s Apple I was pure hacker genius. Silicon Valley was built around the hacker subculture which dared to “go deep” but with a spirit of independence and adventure.

Similarly, around this time there were other subcultures closely connected to hacking which garnered media and law enforcement scrutiny such as cracking and phreaking.

Cracking is about understanding the boundaries of a system, how it works and what its weaknesses are. The internet provided an endless array of systems that crackers could study and try to break.

Phreaking was primarily concerned with tricking phone systems into making free calls. It was probably true that phreakers knew the telecommunication systems better than the average telco engineer.

In the late 80s and early 90s law enforcement was starting to tackle the rise of computer crime and they, with help of the media, started lumping the three groups under a single heading of "hackers". Today the term is almost always used in the negative sense and the subculture has been forced to adopt new names such as "special user groups" and "makers".

I don’t think it was coincidental that as the computer manufacturing and personal computing market grew and threw off its hacker roots that they then started to see the hacker subculture as the enemy trying to plumb their secrets. The technology business was growing in importance to US exports and hackers were an annoyingly independent bunch that needed to be made to look questionable in the eyes of the law to keep them in check.

For a short while I tutored at university a subject for business students to learn the basics of application development in order to automate their reporting needs. Computer driven business intelligence was still a very young discipline and most of the time you had to write your own macros and queries. Some students quickly developed the hacker mentality and were regularly exceeding the assignments both in sophistication and imagination, while others displayed a very tentative, almost fearful belief that they would “break” the software as if experimenting with different functions would prove too much for the fragile machine. I could never get to the bottom of the reasons for the second group. No doubt there was some history of some bad software that ate their data and they incorrectly blamed themselves.

I regularly encourage my colleagues to, if time permits, learn a new aspect of their software tools and experiment on sample data to grow in familiarity and expertise. Half the battle is reassuring them that they aren’t going to break their computer. I think I hear the collective groan of application and desktop support teams reaching for something to throw at me. But a little bit of hacker spirit may help everyone discover some very satisfying tricks and tools that they could use every day.

Whatever the reasons for hesitancy in some, I am grateful to those hackers that share their creations and understandings so willingly. The internet has enabled these communities to reach beyond the limits of geography and create a new kind of hacker space. May the hacker spirit live on.

At the end of the day, a solid local hacker community when mixed with entrepreneurial vision and access to capital could create fertile grounds for our own Silicon Valley. The rate at which we haemorrhage great technical talent is embarrassing in my opinion. If we can promote and celebrate the real hacker spirit then we can better identify and support the local scene's transition into thriving businesses.

Are you a member of a maker/user group/hacker community? What challenges and motivates you to tinker? Can Australia create its own Silicon Valley?

19 comments so far

Ruxcon (www.ruxcon.org.au) is a great local resource for anyone interested in Computer Security and 'tinkering' in general with computers.

They run monthly talks at RMIT and a yearly weekend long conference which attracts experts from around the world.

I think the hacker spirit is part of your personality, and exists in people who don't know much about computers.Tinkering is what enabled humans to develop the wheel and we've been doing it ever since.

Commenter

Pat

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 11:14AM

yeah right....how about I sneak into your place, have a good look around at things I might tinker with, and take whatever I want....but don't complain about it, will you, because it's good for us !

Commenter

C

Location

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 12:02PM

Way to prove my point that the term hacker has been hijacked to mean breaking into other people's things. Thanks!

Commenter

George Wright

Location

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 1:49PM

You're too shallow C, broaden your definition of hacking abit more!

Commenter

Gerson

Location

Sydney

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 2:35PM

"Can Australia create its own Silicon Valley?" Firstly you can't call it a silicon valley. In the industry patois it has to be a silicon <insert local geography for cuteness>. Australia may have to settle for a Silicon Billabong in order to sound hip. As for whether we could do it ? No and for what it's worth I don't believe we should try. Firstly govts in Australia do not encourage innovation. Secondly there isn't a VC culture here and finally your best and brightest will always head to the real Silicon Valley because lets face facts, that's where the action is.

Commenter

Nicho

Location

Sydney

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 12:09PM

Excuse the expression, George- "syntax error".The mere use of the word hacker in its original context won't even penetrate the sheer depth of ignorance. Australia's Old Guard corporates are way behind. They still think a help desk is a very sympathetic bit of furniture. The New Economy guys do understand the value of tinkering- a lot of them are tinkerers in their own kinds of business- but only get the theory to a point. They need to see performance and costs before they buy in.

The only way a Silicon Valley can get off the ground here is the usual Australian way- Do it yourself and they'll get it 20 years later . There'll be ABC documentaries about it with people saying how much they admired whoever it was who did whatever it was.

Australia's innovators need hard products, sales and the commercial credibility that come with them. That was how the original Silicon Valley grew itself. If you want a real community, you're going to have to create one.

Commenter

Paul Wallis

Location

Sydney

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 12:29PM

I really like the phrase "hard to break but easy to upset", I think you've really nailed that essential attitude towards technology.

One set of grassroots maker/hacker communities are Hackerspaces, of which there are now nearly a dozen active in Australia:http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Australia

When we started "Make, Hack, Void" in Canberra there was some discussion about having Hack in the title of the space, and labelling ourselves a "Hackerspace" rather than "Makerspace." We decided to go for it, and our homepage at makehackvoid.com has a blurb at the bottom to try and explain our usage of the term.

Nevertheless, we've since heard rumours of raised eyebrows during public service interviews (it is Canberra, after all!) In general conversation I tend to favour the term "community workshop" whenever I'm unsure, which is a shame.

- Angus

Commenter

projectgus

Location

Canberra

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 12:30PM

Sounds like my life. I started out on Microbees when I was in primary school in the mid 80s. Found programming - first basic, then assembler - much more fun than playing games and in a few years I knew pretty much everything there was to know about the bee (and then some). At the same time I was becoming obsessed with electronics (blame Dick Smith kits for that :) and the two passions soon merged and soon enough my poor old bee was sprouting wires and odd, admittedly mostly pointless attachments.

Then at uni I discovered *nix and the internet (still in its infancy back then) to communicate with like-minded people and never looked back. These days I'm not part of any formal groups, but I do occasionally drop by some usenet groups dedicated to electronics.

I agree with @Pat that the hacker spirit is part of your personality. Some of us see a cool thing and the first thing we want to do is to pull it apart and figure out how it works (indeed, the coolness often lies in the mystery) while others, bafflingly enough, just seem to lack that curiosity.

Oh, and agree that VI sucks marginally less than emacs, but that's very faint praise as it also sucks marginally more than even the old dos editor.

Commenter

Fred

Location

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 1:21PM

I like this article and the challenge of founding our own hub of innovative commercial success in technology (aka Silicon Billabong). I have been working on making that happen for decades. Nicho's sentiment is the very naysaying that haunts our halls of power and minds of young entrepreneurs both, as well as the uninformed investors that lurk in the shadows.

The hacker spirit of discovery (I started by trying every commend in the manuals for the mainframe to see what would happen) combined with the Australian habit of initiative are a great foundation. If we could have a community culture that is supportive of success, tolerant of failure and believes in a can-do result then the Silicon Billabong will happen. Without that change in culture and as long as our young people think that what they think happens in Silicon Valley is the only way to do things, we are doomed to be an also-ran and not a winner.

Yes, politicians who actually get this and support the change would be wonderful but, seriously, our problems with the quality and ignorance of our politicians are so much bigger. Do this in spite of government not by relying on government.

Commenter

Jordan

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

May 11, 2012, 6:27PM

Hi George,The problem is that today, companies don't encourage their costumers to hack their products. It's quite the opposite. The components cannot be soldered with hobby equipment, and there is no built-in programming language like BASIC in the 80's.It would be quite encouraging if there would be detailed specs available for smartphones without any hacking restrictions (like bootlock).Who will design our products in 30 years time if kids aren't encouraged to play around with the device?